I've never read or written a cover letter and I have a single-page resume.

I've got two sentences at the top of my resume explaining who I am and what I do.

I use much more flowery language but I basically say:

    I'm team lead.
    I care about communication.
    I want to know your business and customers. 
    I want to work with stakeholders and help them solve problems.

The rest of my resume backs this up. And at the bottom, I describe all of the business skills I learned over 4 years of running a furry convention. It's written just like all of the other jobs.

It's worked pretty well for me.

Anecdotally, I've never read a cover letter as someone who's interviewed a good chunk of engineers, but not nearly as many as a lot of the folks on HN. I have however had a much better initial response experience from companies that I added a cover letter for. I think some larger companies that have a resume and cover letter upload on their site just might prioritize those who wrote a cover letter as well. That's just a guess though.

Cover letter importance varies by industry and company, and it hasn't been valuable for me in tech. Even in roles where prose writing is the primary job requirement!

I've participated in hiring for dozens of positions. I don't read cover letters.

Do you have or could point to a good example of a software engineer's cover letter?

I don't have any handy. I was just searching the web for a good example and -- hoo boy! -- there are so many terrible examples out there.

All I can offer you is general guidance, then. This is just my opinion, of course, and there are plenty of disagreeing opinions out there. So take that as you will.

To me, a good cover letter conveys four things:

1) That the candidate has at least some knowledge of the company they're applying to and what sorts of problems the company is likely to need solved.

2) Why you want to work for that company in particular. Highlight how what the company does ties into your personal interests.

3) Summarize and contextualize your experience in a way that explains clearly how your experience will benefit the company. This is your chance to call out any special skills that may be particularly relevant to the position, but aren't clearly called out in the resume.

3) Explain anything in your resume that might not look that great. Did you do a lot of job-hopping? Address that. Does it look like the position you're applying for is a bit outside your normal experience? Explain why. That sort of thing.

A cover letter shouldn't reiterate what the resume says. The resume should speak for itself. A cover letter is just that -- a letter from one person to another. It's where you show who you are and what special value you offer to the company.

You don't need an example if you care about the job and what the company is doing. Just speak from your heart, and tell them why they should hire you. Why do you want the job? Why do you care about the company? What do you want to achieve there? What experience do you bring that you think will help them with their mission? Show them you aren't just submitting the 351st application for a job. Show them you want to work there, for them, that you're the right person for the job. ...And then bring it down a few notches so it sounds 'professional' (confident without being needy or arrogant).

Huh, I can’t remember the last time I’ve written a cover letter, or been asked to read one when interviewing in my 10 year long career. I feel like all these sorts of things happen better over a phone screen or an in person meetup and the resume step is for weeding out noise.

Especially in tech where you get fantastic ESL engineers who might struggle to write flowery prose about their skills but can document their code very well in English.

There are a lot of comments against your advice here so I'm going to speak up in agreement.

(1) Cover letters are very rare. Out of the last ten interviews, I've received two.

(2) It's the one place you can reveal some of your personality. Focus your message to answer this question: "What is it about this role/company/job that you find exciting?"

I have a PDF file with a cover letter on the front and a page or two of resume. Five minutes before the meeting, I'm opening up that PDF, again ... the first thing I see is that cover letter and a candidate that's excited about the job. It puts them on the right footing before the video camera fires up.

I also know that "your resume was produced, once, and probably fired off to several companies in that exact form". While (assuming it was done correctly) "your cover letter was written to me, about this job."

If you've provided it, I'm going to pay more attention to the words on that page than probably any others. So while a cover letter is not required and a resume (often) is, if you include it, it's not controversial to say "it's more important than your resume" as far as its impact on my opinion of you prior to an interview.

Cover letters are a waste of time. You‘ll spend lots of effort writing to 10 companies or so and then they will just ghost you. Applying for a job is a numbers game. Send 50 resumes and get 1 phone call. Or maybe use your network if you have one. Nobody reads cover letters.

That's not my experience. I get ghosted too, of course -- that's just part of how things currently work -- but my ratio is much better than yours. I get a response from about 15% of the applications I make.

Perhaps the difference is because I write cover letters?

Twice in my career I've had recruiters call out my cover letter

Granted, one admitted "usually they're cookie cutter and I don't read them" before praising mine... but I like writing real cover letters because it's a second chance to consider why/how badly I want to work somewhere

I craft them to the company/problem space, call out specific areas of interest. And sometimes halfway in I realize I don't care what they do enough to continue writing, so I save everyone involved's time

I have to say I usually don't read the cover letter either, and wouldn't care too much if they didn't have one, except for new graduates, or where this is their 2nd job where I would like to see a modicum of research on their part.

But usually a cover letter encourages the writer to tell me what they _think_ I want to hear, but not what I really want to know - which the CV usually does much better.

Which means they are often sycophantic and a bit embarrassing - and I usually have too much respect for the people I want to interview to expose them to that :)